Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

anne C. Z. Lotta
like the air we breathe. Show us the contrary, and we wonder
and praise: praise a good action! - praise virtue! - praise a
man because he has done just as he should do!
13tb. A lost day.
14thb. Almost as bad. I fail to keep constantly before my
mind the idea of the shortness of life and the certainty that I
must die. How every disappointment and petty vexation is
swallowed up in that awful truth! What a panacea for all ills!
How cheerful, how happy, I am after thinking of it! It gives
my thoughts a freedom they never had before, and my mind a
calm and delightful elevation. I say it does this when I think
of it, and I was just wondering why it is so little in my thoughts.
Perhaps the reason is that it is unnatural to one of my years and
temperament. Hitherto I have rebelled,- now I submit. Since
life was so fair I was disappointed that it was not paradise. I
have overlooked the actual good, and clamored for the imaginary.
15th. Despite philosophy and everything else, there have been
two or three hours to-day when life was almost insupportable.
Suddenly the fit passed off, and left me as light-hearted as it
found me. How many thousand times has this sickness come
over me, and I have wept till my tears were exhausted! It is a
strange state, this abandonment of despair! Friends, foes, art,
nature, the beautiful, the deformed, all disappear in the blackness
that enshrouds me. Indifference to life, death, heaven, and hell
takes the place of my warm affections and lively perceptions.
Formerly I felt this often, but of late more rarely. As I have
said before, it is not imagination, but truth, that produces this
effect, and the error is in allowing ourselves to think upon that
which maddens and overwhelms us. As in crossing some awful
precipice the only safety is in fixing your eyes on some distant
and motionless object, neglecting which, you are precipitated into
the abyss, so in passing through life, if the soul is diverted from
heaven and repulsed from earth, concentrated in herself, and intent on her slender foothold, she reels with fearful giddiness,
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